OTTAWA-GATINEAU – The Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) has filed a complaint to the CRTC against Bell Canada for allegedly restricting and reducing the bandwidth it provides to third parties.
In its Part VII application filed April 3, the CAIP asks the commission to issue on an expedited basis an interim order directing Bell Canada to “immediately cease and desist from using any technologies to ‘shape,’ ‘throttle,’ and/or ‘choke’ its wholesale ADSL services.” It also wants a final order issued that would prevent Bell from employing the practice.
As well, the CAIP wants the CRTC to declare that Bell has acted unlawfully in a number of ways, including by not following the tariffs approved by the commission, by not providing advance notice to third parties of network changes, and by interfering with the content of messages carried over its telecommunications network contrary to section 36 of the Act and to the Canadian telecommunications policy objectives set out in paragraphs 7(a) and (i) that protect people’s privacy.
It also wants the CRTC to declare that Bell has granted itself “undue and unreasonable preference” and subjected ISPs to an undue and unreasonable disadvantage by shaping, throttling and choking its wholesale ASDL services.
In its application, the CAIP notes that during the week of March 17, Bell Canada unilaterally and without prior notice used “deep packet inspection” (DPI) technology on the Internet traffic of Gateway Access Services (GAS), a wholesale access service.
The technology allows Bell to block out completely or control how fast and when data is transferred. The CAIP complaint cites the example of CBC’s reality TV program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, which was made available for download via BitTorrent, a file-sharing service, on March 23. The CAIP accuses Bell of impeding BitTorrent network traffic, resulting in significant delays in viewers being able to download the show. Users received notices that it could take between two and a half hours and 11 hours to download the program.
Customers have also complained that the speed at which they can download radio or video signals from YouTube is now at one-tenth the rate of what it was before Bell began using DPI, according to the CAIP.
Specifically, the complaint notes that testing has confirmed that Bell’s traffic shaping measures have reduced Internet transfer rates to as low as 30 Kbps downstream and 60 Kbps upstream for residential and business GAS Lite and Basic respectively. However the speeds actually tariffed for GAS are up to 256 Kpbs downstream and upstream for Lite residential customers and 512 Kbps downstream and upstream for Lite business customers, and up to 5 Mbps downstream and up to 800 Kbps upstream for Basic residential customers, and up to 6 Mbps downstream and 800 Kbps upstream for Basic business customers.
The slowdown on the third-party lines, the CAIP notes in its complaint, coincides with a March 13 Bell Canada internal memo notifying its employees that it will be eliminating unlimited Internet usage plans and moving to charges based on usage. Many ISPs, however, employ flat rate or other types of billing models, notes the Part VII application.
Bell wants to “stem the flow of any losses of its Sympatico customers to competitive alternatives once it moves to a full, usage based billing model” (in June 2008), alleges the application. Slowing down the Internet transfer speeds hinders the ISPs ability to remain competitive.
The degradation of the Internet access services “places independent ISPs in an untenable and uncertain position with respect to unhappy end-user customers,” the application points out.
With DPI, Bell can examine the packet data and packet header information of a transmission to identify the type of data being transferred, the ISP upon whose network the data is being transferred, and even the end-user who is sending/receiving the data. Any packets meeting certain conditions as pre-determined by Bell, states the complaint, are sequestered and then delivered only in accordance with conditions established by Bell.
Also referred to as ‘traffic shaping’ or ‘bandwidth throttling’, this activity …“provides Bell with absolute discretion to determine what types of data it will pass along to its GAS customers, when the data will be allowed to pass, and to/from which end-user the data will pass,” notes the Part VII application.
Not only is Bell conferring “undue and unreasonable preference” to itself and applying a “disadvantage to independent ISPS” (contrary to section 27 of the Telecommunications Act), according to the CAIP, the communications conglomerate is violating the privacy of the wholesaler and end-user.
“It also gives rise to concerns that Bell has violated its duty under section 36 of the Act not to control the content or influence that meaning or purpose of telecommunications carried by it for the public,” notes the CAIP submission.
